BioShock 2 Review

2K Marin makes its mark with a big, metal boot.

Take a moment to consider how bizarre this game world really is. It's set in an underwater sprawl of surface-style skyscrapers, a city called Rapture. Filling the pressurized space is a society founded by an industrialist named Andrew Ryan with the notion that there'd be no limits on what the individual could accomplish. It was all a spectacular failure as the civilization that developed on the ocean floor turned to genetic modification. Gradually their sanity was devoured by their unrestricted experimentation as they ripped each other to shreds and withdrew into private pockets of insanity. It was a city so rotten and morally oblivious it spawned Little Sisters, girls who roamed Rapture's leaky halls performing the repulsive task of plunging needles into the dead and extracting and ingesting genetic material. Between all the twists of plot was woven an entertaining style of gameplay in the first BioShock, making for a mix of powerful play mechanics, mood, and joy of exploration rarely seen, and one that wound up resonating with the public, making the game a critical and commercial success.

To those who've been playing games for years now, it wasn't exactly surprising that Irrational Games made a great title. The studio had been doing just that since System Shock 2. The bigger unknown was how the folks at 2K Marin, founded with members who worked on the original, would handle the sequel. As it turns out, they did a damn fine job. It's a rare thing for games built with this kind of big budget to take seriously a thematic cohesion between setting, story, and gameplay, yet that's exactly what we get here.

BioShock 2, unlike its predecessor, is split into single-player story and multiplayer competitive modes, so in that sense it's a bigger title. The gameplay, at its core, is largely the same. You use a combination of weapons and special powers called plasmids to battle your way through freakish enemies on a quest that leads you deep within Rapture's recesses, uncovering all manner of ghoulish secrets on the way. The progression structure remains intact as well, so you'll move through a number of discrete stages where you'll be assigned tasks unique to that area before getting back on the path to the story climax. While it'll feel initially very familiar, it won't be long before you start to run into some of the changes 2K Marin has made, all of which are welcome and help refine the gameplay formula to make for a better play experience.

The story picks up 10 years after the events of BioShock. Jack, the unfortunate soul from the first game, is out. This time you play as a totally different character, a Big Daddy that's searching for a specific Little Sister. It's a tale that lacks some of the bite-your-tongue chaos and panic of the first and, because Rapture is a familiar place now, some of the mystery. But it makes up for that by being more tightly wound and digestible. While Rapture's still packed with lunatics, a lot of what you encounter, from the audio logs stuffed under soaked refuse to the hastily scrawled messages on the walls, for the most part directly refer back to the main events of the game. For the sequel, where there are fewer questions about what a splicer is and why the city failed and more about who you are and what you're doing, it turns out this kind of approach works well, driving the action with a more coherent momentum.

That's not to imply Rapture's lost its endearing madness in transition -- far from it. Dedicated players who are willing to wander and pick up all the audio tapes will find plenty of details to absorb, which I won't spoil. Throughout the experience you'll find a more clear-eyed approach to bringing the player to moral crossroads in several ways, one of the more obvious examples of which has to do with the Little Sisters. Big Daddies, in case you aren't familiar with BioShock's fiction, were created to protect the girls. Since you actually play as one of these giant armored monsters in BioShock 2, the connection is strengthened. You're no longer an outsider looking in at an inexplicably strange relationship dynamic; you're the overprotective parent of the pair. In that sense, it makes harvesting the sisters for their Adam (killing them so you can upgrade yourself), even more reprehensible, again reinforcing a sturdier system of moral choice.

If you don't want to harvest, you can choose to adopt one of the Little Sisters instead. This leads into defense sequences where you'll perform the role of other wandering Big Daddies seen in Rapture, standing guard while the girl pulls Adam out of the dead and blasting away all the splicers that invariably try to interrupt the process. With a nice array of defensive options in your arsenal, from hacked security bots to trap bolts and rivets and mini-turrets, in addition to all your regular offensive options, these sequences can be a lot of fun. Alongside the Big Daddy battles and more challenging Big Sister encounters, they serve as yet another opportunity to dig into your deep arsenal of plasmid powers and multiple ammunition types. If the thought of a defense sequence makes you slightly nauseous, it should be reassuring to hear you can skip them entirely, the cost being that you just missed out on a bunch of Adam.